Syzygy

by Frederik Pohl

  Saunders Robinson was studying the wall of signed photographs of people like Van Heflin and Audrey Hepburn, souvenirs of a quarter-century ago. He turned to Danny with complete self-possession. “No, you’re not bothering me, Mr. Deere.”

  “Well, that’s good, because I hate to think my talking interferes with you having a good time.”

  “I do have a suggestion, Mr. Deere,” the black man said. “I think the clothes we wear should reflect hot colors—fire, flames, volcano. Red and yellow and orange, I think.”

  Deere looked at him silently for a moment. “Yeah,” he said at last. “All right. That’s good. No blue jeans, no fatigues, no O.D.s. All you people probably have something that will do, I don’t care what—shorts, slacks, tank-tops, T-shirts, anything. Except the girls, anyway. You get some pretty little girls with nice builds, they can wear tight shorts, but those big fat mommas I saw at the hotel got to wear muumuus. You got that?”

  “I have a suggestion too, Danny,” the bearded one said. “Did I tell you about my grandmother?”

  “What the hell do I want with your grandmother?”

  “She’s a professor at Caltech,” Dennis said. “Senator Pedigrue’s brother offered her a job to investigate the Jupiter Effect.”

  Danny scowled thoughtfully. “All by herself?”

  “I don’t know, Danny. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, find out! And find out what she’s going to say, and when she’s going to say it! That could be kind of interesting, kid,” he finished, more to himself than to Dennis Siroca.

  He opened the door. “Let’s see you do that shuffle out of here,” he ordered. It was always useful to know just how far you could push a person; he expected an argument, if not outright refusal. He didn’t get it. He got a quick look of anger, but from the white guy, not the nigger. Saunders Robinson did not even turn around; he just began the shuffle, whispering the chant to himself, as he moved down the hall toward the staircase. After a moment Dennis Siroca shrugged and followed him and, satisfied, Danny went into the pantry next to his office, where Joel de Lawrence was typing with two fingers. He interrupted himself to display the glasses Robinson and Siroca had used, lifting them by spreading his fingers inside. On the outside was a fine set of fingerprints, brought out by the garden-mister de Lawrence had sprayed them with. “I’m just making out the cards, Danny,” he said. “You want me to run the prints through Lieutenant Pachman?”

  “Nah, it isn’t worth it—yet,” Danny said. “Just keep them around. And don’t get the labels mixed up.”

  In Siroca’s VW beetle Robinson lit a joint and passed it to Dennis. “How much did you get?”

  “Fifty dollars a day for you and me, twenty-five for the full-timers. Ten bucks each for anybody who goes out on the street.”

  “Shit, man, what can you do with ten bucks?”

  “Well, I told him that, Saun. He told me forget it. He told me he was giving us the ashram rent-free, and he was going to go for a five-thou investment, and that was all; after that we have to support ourselves.”

  “Figures, man. Did he say how?”

  “I think he’ll come up with something, Saun. Anyway, I’ve got an idea. Know where we can score some good dope?”

  Robinson scowled at the joint. “What’s wrong with this?”

  “No, I mean at least a key. We can pay the troops off in dope instead of money.”

  Robinson took a long hit, considering. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I thought you were the pot expert?”

  “I don’t want to go back to my connections, Saun, they’re pretty heavy now.”

  “All right, I guess I know who to talk to. You coming to see Feef? She’s asking about you. “

  “Not today, Saun. I’m heading out for the Valley. Any place you want me to drop you?” He passed the joint back to Robinson, who took a roach clip out of the glove compartment; they finished the joint, and then Robinson got out at a shopping center and Dennis Siroca turned toward one of the ravine roads. As he stopped for a light a couple of bikers roared up behind and yelled something at him. He didn’t look around, just turned enough so they could see his beard. Dennis was slim and fair, and when he wore his sulfur-yellow hair pulled back in a leather thong studs were always hitting on him from behind. So at twenty he had tried cutting that down by growing the beard, and then the situation had reduced itself to an amusement.

  In his twenty-some years Dennis had had time for three years of college—well, call it two years, one semester and a couple of incompletes. When he went he did well, even stoned, even tripping through classes for a week at a time. He couldn’t see a point in going, though, except to please his grandparents. At twenty-two he stopped going at all. A little bit, it was money. The scholarships stopped coming when he stopped attending regularly, and he had objections to taking money from his grandfather. Then, after the second winter up among the redwoods, he had plenty of money—more than eighty thousand dollars in twenty-and fifty-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box in Pasadena. But he couldn’t see the point of that, either.

  Dennis had never taken a drug arrest, much less a conviction, but they’d had him for shoplifting in Medford, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he was still on probation for resisting arrest in ibullas. He hadn’t resisted. He just hadn’t got out of the way fast enough when a gay-rights demonstration he was watching from the sidelines got maumaued by some up-tight citizens and the police moved in. Dennis had nothing against the police. They did their job. He didn’t want the job himself, and didn’t blame the people who did want it for being the kind of people who would. Dennis was religiously non-violent. That was why he’d given up the profitable, socially admirable and ecologically sound profession of marijuana farming up among the big trees in Humboldt County. The hijackers were not at all non-violent. When one of his neighbors bought an AK-47 and Dennis heard it being fired, he harvested his crop, drove it to Eureka, made a left turn and kept on going. In Los Angeles he took the first offer for the load and retired from the business.

  Dennis disliked freeways, and so his trip over the mountains and through the developments to grandmother’s house took nearly an hour. As he got to the intersection where the road his grandparents lived on began to wind down from the hillside, he stopped the car and closed his eyes. Twenty minutes of meditation was always useful. Dennis had done a lot of exploring in his fairly short lifetime. In between schooling and dealing and wandering, he had had a relationship with the Hare Krishnas, and a flirtation with the Moonies, two months of Scientology, and a sort of step-sister course in est—his old lady spent three hundred dollars for the weekend, and came home to give it to him second-hand for free. Of them all, the only one he still had any confidence in was Transcendental Meditation—not counting, of course, the Jupiter Terror. And that he had all too much confidence in. He had no doubt at all. No doubt that it would happen, and no doubt that it was well deserved by a human race that had forgotten how to be gentle.

  When the twenty minutes were up Dennis Siroca squirted his mouth with Binaca, smoothed back his hair, buttoned his leather jacket and put the Volkswagen in gear to descend to his grandmother’s house.

  When Meredith Bradison heard her grandson’s VW turning into the driveway she was making up the bed she and her husband shared in the large, light room that over-j looked the road. She peered through the louvered shades to make sure, then tugged the corners of the coverlet approximately straight and left it. It was good enough. It had been made once already that day, anyway, by the mornings-only maid, and still showed traces of order. She took time to run a brush through her hair, studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror for a moment and then shrugged and went down to admit her grandson.

  Meredith Bradison was sixty-six years old, her husband sixty-five, and they still made love with a frequency about two-point-five times the twenty-five-year-old normal, in the afternoons when the maid was out of the house, in hotel rooms between her convention sessions or his politicking, in t
he back of their camper, parked beside a lake or in a national forest, wherever. When the grandchildren began to be old enough to come for visits, any of the five sets of grandchildren, it cramped their style very little. The grandchildren learned that when Grandma said she was going to catch forty winks with Grandpa in the middle of the day, the kids were not invited. At night for a tuck-in story, yes. In the morning, when they woke up early and climbed in with the old folks, sure. But not always. And the way Emily or Dennis or Junior or Merry could tell the difference was by whether or not the door was locked.

  There were times when the way Meredith felt about her husband embarrassed her, or at least made her wonder why her contributions to conversations with her contemporaries were so unlike theirs. Those times rarely lasted more than a minute. The rest of the time she knew a good thing when she had it, and she had Sam Houston Bradison. When they got married, him still in his junior year at Stanford and herself a dropout he was encouraging to return to school, it hadn’t looked all that promising. Her mother wouldn’t even come west from Lehigh County,

  Pennsylvania, for the wedding. But it worked out pretty well, at that.

  Sam Houston Bradison had been mentioned as a dark-horse candidate for governor more than once. One time he had even made his run for Congress. But he was before his time. That was in the Franklin D. Roosevelt years, when he was a young man, when California was profoundly New Deal when it wasn’t Ham and Eggs or Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Or worse. On the Republican ticket Sam got creamed. After he got his doctorate he stuck to teaching political science instead of practicing it. At least, openly. But the inner circles of the California Republican Party were open to him at all times. He was an academic, and the husband of a woman who was becoming a famous scientist, and the bearer of a proud name. He spent weekends with John Wayne on the actor’s converted landing-craft yacht. He was one of the strongest supporters of Dick Nixon, and bled with him in the hotel room in 1962 as the bad news about the governorship race was coming in, just before the “you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more” outburst. Later, Ronald Reagan phoned him at least every other week to ask his opinion before doing as he pleased. It was queer of Professor Bradison that he had never supported the war in Vietnam and, even in the 1950s, spoke out against academic blacklists. But what would you expect of a professor?

  In any event and whatever the cause, Meredith was there with him. After the New Deal fervor that had brought her out to join a boy-friend in the CCC and, briefly, share the life of the migrant workers John Steinbeck was writing about, she cleaved to Sam Houston Bradison as to a rock. She made her decision early. Birthing five children was a full-time job. Adding a scientific career on top of that made a double load. She handled both easily and well, but add in her forty-five-year love affair with her husband, and there simply were not hours enough for getting involved in politics, or women’s groups, or even in shopping, cooking or fashion. Meredith Bradison was widely known as the worst cook west of Texas, and she cheerfully identified herself as a frump. It didn’t matter whether her clothes were color-matched or her hair coiffed. At sixty-six she still had a graceful, slim, boy’s body, and whatever she wore she improved.

  She stood at the open door, waiting for her grandson. “What’s holding you up now, Dennis? Brushing your teeth so I won’t smell beer on your breath?”

  Dennis looked up, startled. Actually he had been making sure the stash that had been in the glove compartment was now securely out of sight under the floor mat, but she was close enough to what he had been doing earlier to disconcert him. “You just missed your grandfather,” she said, tilting her cheek to be kissed. “He has a late independent-study group tonight. My God, it’s nice to see you!”

  Dennis put his arms around his grandmother without squeezing, as though she were a porcelain shepherdess, and let her lead him into the living room. He noticed the bowls of Fritos and salted peanuts on the coffee table and his eyes widened. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

  “No, dear. I have some people coming over in half an hour or so, but you’re welcome to stay. I know you’re interested in the subject, since you’re in that bunch that was at the ASF meeting.”

  Dennis shrugged politely; he had half expected to see his grandmother there herself, was not surprised that one of her friends had recognized him and passed the word on. “That’s the only way I knew you were back in California,” she went on, sitting down across from him to study him better. “Is Zee with you?”

  “No, Gram. She’s got a business deal in P.R.”

  Meredith sighed. “She’s always got a business deal,” she said. “I guess that’s one of the reasons I liked her so much. You’re not eating enough, Dennis.” She had nine grandchildren, but he was the one who worried her the most. To Meredith’s knowledge he had been arrested five times (the actual count was nine). The only conviction she knew of was for shoplifting, but it was Meredith’s opinion that he had been guilty as hell of all of them, and probably a lot more. Not out of evil. Not even out of any need. Dennis was just willful, and had been ever since he had run off to join Reverend Moon—and been ejected unceremoniously when they discovered he was only twelve years old at the time. Her daughter, Amy, had simply given up. When Dennis returned to his family, it was his grandparents he returned to. Sam Bradison yelled at him, half an hour at a time. For a marvel, the boy listened. But he did not change. Meredith didn’t yell. She took him out to McDonald’s and filled him full of cheeseburgers and shakes, and slipped him pocket money.

  When he was little she had given him cookies and milk. The cookies came out of a supermarket box; it was the best meal that any of the grandchildren usually could expect at grandmother’s house. Now that he was one of those curious people with placards and beards, her resources seemed inadequate. He didn’t want anything to eat, although he accepted a can of beer and a handful of Fritos out of politeness. “Gram?”

  She straightened up from the floor of the closet, where she was looking for the attachment to the vacuum-cleaner hose. “Yes, dear?”

  “Who are these people?”

  She frowned thoughtfully, one hand on the closet doorknob. “Dr. Tibor Sonderman s in earth sciences. I believe he used to be with Scripps. Georgia Keating doesn’t have her doctorate, but then she’s quite young. She has a JPL grant, but I believe it’s running out. I’ve never met her—haven’t met either of them, really, although I think Dr. Sonderman and I were at the governor’s conference together, two years ago—oh, thank you, dear! Let me take that.” While she was talking Dennis had walked to the closet, picked up the cleaner part she was looking for and fitted it onto the hose.

  He stroked her shoulder and grinned. “What do you want cleaned, just the carpet here?”

  “I think so,” she said, glancing around at the room as though it were his. “Let’s see, what else do I need to do?”

  “You need to sit down while I do this for you,” her grandson said. “You can go on telling me about these two people?”

  Obediently Meredith sat on a hassock, watching him expertly slide the vacuum over the rug. “Well,” she said, “this is just a sort of get-acquainted meeting. I haven’t actually accepted the job, although I suppose—Good heavens!”

  The glasses on the sideboard tinkled together, and she felt a sort of vibration through the house, as though a very heavy truck were rumbling by. But there were no trucks on Mountain Laurel Drive. It lasted only a moment. But the effect on her grandson lasted longer than that. He was transfixed, and the look on his face was very much like terror.

  Tibor Sonderman was stopped for a light on Ventura Boulevard when he felt the tremor. A man making his way across the street in front of him with a four-legged crutch stopped, scowling angrily at the world. Hanging ferns outside a florist’s shop at the corner swayed briefly. Tib switched on the radio and began to hunt across the dial.

  All the stations were blandly continuing with whatever they had been doing, rock, folk, soul, sports, or talk. By the
time he reached Meredith Bradison’s house he had made his own assessment: no more than 3.5 on the Richter, or there would have been something said about it; no less than 3.0, or he wouldn’t have felt it at all. Just another of the several hundred shocks that hit Southern California every year.

  Rainy Keating’s car was tucked into the little drive space ahead of him. Tib eased his little Horizon into the space between it and somebody’s old Volkswagen beetle, and was admitted by a handsome, tiny, elderly woman. “Dr. Bradison?” he asked.

  “Please call me Meredith,” she said, letting him in through a sort of greenhouse of a foyer. From the look of the entrance Tib expected something Hollywoodian for a living room, if not a salon, but what he saw was a quite plain room furnished in clutter. On what was obviously a retired sofa bed Rainy Keating was listening to her telephone messages. “I think you two know each other?” Meredith said, and Rainy looked up with the phone to her ear to acknowledge Tib’s presence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, hanging up the phone as a tall, fair-bearded young man came in with a tray of glasses. “I was just checking to see—hey! I know you.”

  Dennis Siroca said apologetically, “I guess you do, Miz Keating. I’m the one that broke your what’s-it.”

  “My orrery.”

  Meredith Bradison said, “Well, I didn’t know you two knew each other, either.”

  “Just a little bit,” Tib said, grinning. “It is probably -your grandson’s fault that we are all here now, Meredith. He put on a little exhibition for us in Arecibo.”

  “Oh, Dennis! Were you that one?” He shrugged, not really embarrassed, and offered drinks around. “Well, you’re full of surprises,” she told him; and to the others, “I’m really grateful you came here today. I thought it was a good idea for us to know each other a little better before we got into any formal activities.”